Hey Dr Reames! I’ve been reading Anthony Everitt’s biography of Alexander and he seems obsessed with boosting the importance of Bagoas. Some time ago I read your post about Bagoas and the role he likely had historically, and I wondered why, in your opinion, do so many biographers feel compelled to discuss him with such certainty if the sources we have are contradictory?
First, I’m going to admit that I’ve not read this biography, nor do I intend to (not any time soon). My reason is simple: Everitt is not an Alexander/Macedonia specialist. He’s not even a trained historian, but seems to specialize in performance and the vision arts with a penchant for writing pop history. He read in English literature at Cambridge, so seems to have no formal historical training. There are SO many books chapters/articles/books written by my colleagues, published each year, I can’t even keep up with that tide of published scholarship, never mind pop history from non-specialists.
That may—probably does—sound haughty, but it’s just pragmatic. I want to write my OWN stuff (academic and fiction both), as well as read things I need to read…not to mention do my job (which includes a lot of class prep, grading, and service). Ergo, I must be very circumspect in what I do read.
Given your question, I strongly suspect I wouldn’t care much for his book. Given the full title of the book, I’m even more certain I wouldn’t. Every time “mysterious death” pops up related to Alexander, I can be about 98% sure it’s going to be sensationalist and used to sell books. As someone who’s written about Alexander’s death myself, as well as Hephaistion’s demise, and who’s actually read in bereavement studies and done bereavement counselling, I lack patience for the sort of crackpot stuff I find too often about ATG’s last 9-10 months. That’s part of why I wrote “The Mourning of Alexander.”
Having said that, I could be wrong and he does a fine treatment of ATG’s death. I’ve simply been burned too often to expect it. Looking at the titles of his other history/biographies, however, he seems to lean to the sensationalist. He knows how to sell books.
As for Bagoas, to be honest, when you see him overemphasized in a biography, you’re looking at the enormous influence of Renault. I’ve written about that before, as the asker indicated. Macedonian and Alexander specialists don’t give him a lot of space because he’s a minor figure, if he existed at all and isn’t pure Roman fiction. (Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if he did exist, but he most certainly didn’t have any sort of outsized impact on ATG.)
As noted, I think the tendency to give it to him really does owe to Renault. It may also owe to a need to find some new “angle” on Alexander that will sell books for him. 😉 Why write (or publish) Yet Another biography on Alexander unless there’s something new-ish to say?
Too bad the newish thing doesn’t involve all the cool stuff coming out of the ground at Archontiko, Sindos, or Vergina in Macedonia that’s making us rethink what we knew about Archaic and early Classical Macedonia….
What are words worth? : 2003 : Professor Anthony Everitt’s community radio report, The Radio Authority
A report by Anthony Everitt that evaluates the Radio Authority's pilot access radio projects for a new community radio station licensing sch
I like to be helpful. If I have a skill, I will offer it to help solve a problem at work. I thought that was what working for an organisation was all about. The bringing together of people with different skills to work together to move things forward. But, in reality, I have often found that demonstrating a skill you have at work can get you noticed, but not necessarily in a positive way. Bizarrely, someone in a workplace who can demonstrate proven skills can be seen as the enemy. Why? Because, in the British media industry, most people are appointed not on the basis of the skills they bring to the job, but on the basis of who they are. Are they ‘one of us’? Did they go to the right school, usually a private school? Do they speak with a posh accent? Do they know the ‘right people’? Once given the job, these incumbents do not take kindly to some upstart colleague or underling who demonstrates in the workplace that they have proven skills which their posh colleague or manager have never had … and have never had to have. They have been granted their role because they are simply ‘the right stuff’.
The Radio Authority had commissioned a report about the potential for a new community radio sector in the United Kingdom. The Authority had no real interest in launching community radio, but it had suddenly become convenient. The British commercial radio industry had lobbied to be relieved of its responsibility to provide local news bulletins on its radio stations. News was expensive, compared to DJ’s playing records. News was unionised and journalists were relatively well paid compared to non-unionised local presenters. After 30-odd years of having had to provide local news bulletins, commercial radio owners demanded to their regulator, the Radio Authority, that this requirement be stopped. But how to succeed in proving that doing less, cutting its services, making journalists redundant, could be argued as good for commercial radio’s listeners? It needed a good wheeze that was believable.
Although there had been demands for a community radio sector in Britain since the 1970’s that had consistently been rebuffed by the regulator and government, thirty years later it was suddenly the perfect time to accept and promote the idea. The plot went like this: new community radio stations would broadcast local news to their listeners, so what was the point of local commercial radio stations also providing a similar local news service? The commercial radio industry cooked up a scheme with the regulator under which community radio stations would be licensed nationwide for the first time. However, those stations would be shackled to a licence regime that denied them the technical resources to reach many people, the financial resources to be sustainable or the ability to generate revenues by selling on-air advertising. As a result, these stations would prove no threat to existing commercial radio owners, either by stealing their listeners or their revenues. Starved of sustainability, community radio stations would likely go bust very quickly. The stations themselves could be blamed for their failures, not The Radio Authority and certainly not commercial radio.
For the commercial radio industry, this was a win-win proposal. This new tier of community radio stations was to be licensed to fail but could relieve them of having to continue the expensive job of providing local news. Their stations could later lobby that they no longer needed to be local at all because they no longer broadcast local news. Their stations could be regional, or even national, cutting their operators’ expenses even further. The British government went along with this bizarre scam. I sat in the front row of a conference and witnessed a government minister argue from the podium that, by licensing a new tier of community radio stations to broadcast local news, commercial radio owners could no longer be required to provide regular local news bulletins. I wanted to jump up and shout “bullshit” but everyone in the audience nodded their heads sagely as if it all made perfect logical sense. Not for the first time, I felt like the upstart in a room of worthies who could not see the reality unfolding in front of them because their only evident skill was having ‘the right stuff’.
It was 2003. I desperately wanted a job working in radio but all my applications for vacancies had been rejected. So here I was unexpectedly working for the Radio Authority. By now, I had sat at my desk for several months without doing any work. That sentence is not an exaggeration. My managers had not given me a single task to do, so I had been able to sit there, getting on with my own projects on my desktop computer, but looking busy. I had no idea why I had been recruited for a job that seemed to involve doing nothing. Now they had commissioned a report on the potential for community radio from an academic. I had had no involvement in the commissioning. Nobody at the Radio Authority had ever asked me anything about community radio, despite the fact that I was the sole employee to have worked in a British community radio station. In 1983 I had been a founder member of the Community Radio Association. I was the only person at The Radio Authority who had attended the Association’s last annual conference. I had circulated to colleagues a short note on what had happened at the conference. Nobody responded.
Somebody in the office shared with me a Word copy of the professor’s completed report to read and told me it was about to be sent to the designers commissioned to put fancy graphics and a cover around it. I read it and realised immediately that the document was not ready to print. Nobody at the Radio Authority had even thought about editing the report, correcting the layout, correcting typos or doing all the little stuff that a sub-editor has to do prior to publication. I had not been given this Word document because it was my responsibility at work or because of my experience as a writer and editor since the 1970’s. A conversation ensued that seemed rather baffling to my colleague. I suggested the document could not be published as it was because it had not been ‘subbed’. Bafflement. I tried a different approach. If the document was published as is, it would prove an ‘embarrassment’ to the Radio Authority. I had already learnt that my workplace only acted decisively when it needed to avoid ‘embarrassment’. It worked. I offered to sub-edit the document prior to publication because I had the skills that apparently nobody else in my office possessed.
During the next few weeks, I communicated regularly with the report’s author whilst editing his document. I was pleased to have something to do that could use my skills and was connected with radio. I knew about community radio, I knew about editing. I had honed these skills over several decades. In the back of my mind, I must also have been thinking that I might be given some actual work to do by my managers at the Radio Authority in editing and/or community radio if I demonstrated my skills with this document. I wanted to be able to use my skills in my job. Until now, I had had no opportunity to show what I could do. After completing the editing of the document, I shared it with the author who was fulsome in his praise for my contribution and commented that I had been the best editor he had ever worked with. I handed back the edited version to my colleague. It was passed to the designers and printed.
I was not even sure that my line mangers knew or cared that I had edited this report. Internally I did not receive any credit or thanks for my work. On the contrary, I was the only employee denied an end-of-year bonus that year. My hope that it might lead to my involvement in the licensing of new community radio stations was quashed when it was announced that the person responsible would be Soo Williams who worked in the same office as me. I had never heard her express any interest in community radio. She was initially charged with organising a large meeting with community groups interested in applying for licences. She seemed fearful and asked me how to organise such a meeting and to suggest a suitable venue. I helped selflessly, once again with the hope it would lead to involvement. She accepted my suggestion of hiring a room at the London School of Economics. The meeting went ahead. I was not invited. I had no further involvement in The Radio Authority’s work on community radio.
In 2019, Soo Williams was awarded an MBE for her services to community radio.
Recensione: "Alexander the Great. His Life and His Mysterious Death" di Anthony Everitt
Recensione: “Alexander the Great. His Life and His Mysterious Death” di Anthony Everitt
ENGLISH REVIEW: HERE.
Buongiorno a tutti, grazie di essere su Alessandro III di Macedonia, blog su Alessandro Magno e Ellenismo. Oggi vi parlo di un libro che ho letto nella sua edizione inglese ma che è recentemente stato tradotto anche in italiano. Se guardate le date di inizio e di fine della lettura di questo libro è parecchio tempo, ma quando iniziai a leggerlo lo mollai dopo una trentina…
Review: "Alexander the Great. His Life and His Mysterious Death" by Anthony Everitt
Review: “Alexander the Great. His Life and His Mysterious Death” by Anthony Everitt
RECENSIONE IN ITALIANO: QUI.
Hello everyone, thank you for being on Alessandro III di Macedonia, blog on Alexander the Great and Hellenism. Today I’m talking about a book that I have read in its English edition but which has recently been translated into Italian as well. If you look at the start and end dates for reading this book, it’s a long time, but when I started reading it I dropped it…
